Rollin’ Stone From Dallas

When we got Jim Smith’s note about his latest restoration project, it seemed like the perfect expression of “more of the same.” You see, this is the second time Jim and his crew at the Hot Rod Garage in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, are restoring the historic Rollin’ Stone B/SR.

“The first restoration was done by our shop around 2000, with the goal to do some vintage racing,” Jim writes. As often happens, though, plans changed. The car was sold, and Jim’s idea of building a 12-second drag car gave way to the new owner’s wish to make it a show car. He took it to the ’07 Grand National Roadster Show (marking the 75th anniversary of the Deuce) and the Pebble Beach Concours that same year. In January 2008, it was sold at Barrett-Jackson and is now in the collection of Larry Martin, “a prominent Houston collector who really appreciates the historical significance of this car,” Jim says.

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The black-and-white photos in this story speak to that significance. Jim says the car “raced all over the Southwest in the late ’50s,” and he first saw it when he was a teenager in Dallas in 1956. Its owner, Carl Stone, ran the roadster at the ’57 NHRA Nationals in Oklahoma City—just the third Nationals, and the first under NHRA’s fuel ban. Stone won the B/SR class, running 13.97 at 98.03 mph.

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In HOT ROD’s coverage of the Big Go (in the Nov. ’57 issue), they called Carl’s roadster “one of the neatest cars at the Nationals.” Eric Rickman photographed the car during the race weekend, and he wrote a feature that ran in the Jan. ’58 HOT ROD. When we got Jim’s note, we dug up those feature photos plus some unpublished outtakes from the photo archive.

10/12Here’s the Rollin’ Stone in the Hot Rod Garage, getting a new lease on life with its vintage drag race running gear. Jim hopes to have the car finished by year’s end.

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“Now to the interesting part,” Jim says. He and his son “kept all the original running gear, rearend, ’39 trans with Zephyr gears, and the original uncut frame, along with the ’57 283 engine.” When Larry Martin learned Jim had all those parts, he asked Jim to “reunite all this original equipment with the original body to make it a truly authentic restoration.” Jim and his crew are “progressing nicely,” he says, and he hopes to have it finished by the end of 2013.